Best photos of the Universe, 2012

Phil Plait, American astronomer and Science writer-is responsible for the interesting blog about the latest news in astronomy and Space ” Bad Astronomy “(which this year moved to Slate.com), and also led the Discovery Channel program Bad Universe whose episode about asteroids was indispensable to our special article on the destruction of Earth .

As 2012 ends, Plait made a huge article in your blog with the most beautiful images related to astronomy that have taken this year. It is clear that the article includes Photographs of events ‘land’ as northern lights or even the classic photograph of himself Curiosity. Of all the images of Plait, we selected eight that took our breath away:

1. – The Sun roars

On August 31, 2012 the Sun’s magnetic field up a lot of superheated plasma into space at 1,400 kilometers per second. The plasma arced than 300,000 kilometers, about 25 times larger than Earth. Expect more activities like this in the coming months.

2. – Venus crossing in front of the Sun

The orbit of Venus was aligned to pass exactly opposite the Sun on June 5, 2012. This type of event will occur in December 2117.

3. – A galaxy as we all recognize

We introduce NGC 5033, a beautiful spiral galaxy located 50 million light years from Earth is also the ideal angle to take a picture with a total exposure of 13 hours and enjoy a galaxy whose shape is the most recognized for all.

4. – The giant eye of Saturn

Definitely a strange planet Saturn, as well as its giant ring, and quite near the North Pole, is a strange, huge hexagonal storm (yes, hexagonal ) of 25,000 kilometers in diameter (twice the size of Earth) in whose center is the dubbed ‘eye of Saturn’, which we can see in the photo taken by the Cassini spacecraft (the eye has 2,000 miles across).

5. – A forming star expelling material which can

Sharpless 2-106 is a star, baby, like many stars in training, has a circumstellar disk of material that rotates around it (which is hard to see in the picture), and expelling matter and energy as if the light from a lighthouse. This material hits expelled gas and dust clouds generated by the blue regions of the image. The process is quite complex and not yet well understood how it works, but it’s nice, it’s nice.

6. – Do not anger a black hole

In the center of the galaxy Hercules is a supermassive black hole that absorbs large amounts of material, and forms a rotating disk with a temperature so high that it wants to expand and explode violently. Among the magnetic forces, friction and other, the material is strongly driven by two rays that come from the ‘poles’ of the disk so fast that travel hundreds of light years before settling down in speed and the two red clouds observed in the image.

The overall structure has more than a million light years from end to end, but what you would expect from an object whose main engine is a black hole with 2,500 million times the mass of the sun?

7. – Deep, deep well

The image is striking for a number of reasons, among which is the fact that it is the combination of two thousand photos taken by the Hubble telescope, which accounted for a total exposure of two million seconds, or 23 days.

Virtually every one of the objects in the image correspond to a galaxy with billions of stars. However, this is a region of sky that was specifically chosen because it was thought to be relatively empty, so the Hubble telescope shows us that no matter where you look in the universe, there will always be something there. In fact, the current record for the farthest galaxy ever detected was through this picture.